You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies)
by Lamia of the Dark
Summary: [Drabble Collection] Eventually I'll write a proper fic about Crowley raising children. This isn't it. Crackfic with all the assorted bits and pieces of scenarios that my brain keeps coughing up. None of the chapters are directly related to each other, unless otherwise noted.
1. Suddenly, Demon Child!

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

"Crowley? What are you doing with that child?"

"Oh, this? This is my daughter."

"You... had a child..."

"Yeah. Cute little monster, right?"

At this point the child turned her head and hissed at Aziraphale. The angel wasn't sure whether she was some kind of snake, or if hissing was just a general demon thing.

"Oh, and, actually she's adopted," Crowley added. "Demons don't usually, you know, procreate." When the angel just stared at him, he continued, "Not that we're forbidden, it's just that it takes them so _long_ to mature, and who wants to spend two millennia raising a little monster when there's all kinds of other evil things to be done..."

He trailed off. The answer to his question was, of course, _Crowley_. Crowley would rather spend two millennia raising a demon child than doing various other evil things.

"Oh," Aziraphale said, finally managing to find his voice. "What, uh... what's her name, then?"

"Query."

"You can't call her that!"

"Why not? It's a very evil name, perfect for a demon."

~oOo~


	2. You Can't Call Him That

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

Aziraphale was not sure about being left alone to babysit Crowley's child, but Crowley had insisted that he couldn't have the little one underfoot while he was handing off the Antichrist, so here the little monster was, sitting on the couch in the back room of the angel's bookshop.

"So, um... uh... Sera..."

Oh, Heavens, this was so awkward. He never knew what to say to children. He couldn't even bring himself to call the child by her full name. (Which was _Viscera_, and he'd admit it sounded pretty if you didn't know what the word _meant_. But still...)

The child merely stared at him, with snakey eyes that bothered him in a way Crowley's didn't. Or perhaps it was the faint aura of demonic menace that surrounded the child which bothered him.

"Who's your friend there?" he asked, referring to the plush toy the child was cuddling.

"Stinky Bastard Plant."

"What? No! You can't call it that."

"That's his name."

"You can't just go around saying _swear words_."

The angel was clearly distressed, but the child seemed unfazed.

"I'm a demon."

Of course, there was no way for Aziraphale to know that the toy, which was a Vileplume Pokemon, had been given the name accidentally by Crowley - whose tendency to be mean to plants extended to stuffed toys of them - and Crowley had eventually just given up on trying to get her to stop repeating it.

~oOo~


	3. There's Two of Them

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

"There's _two_ of them!" Aziraphale blurted out in surprise as Crowley sauntered into view. (If it could still be called sauntering when he was balancing a small child on each hip, which necessarily caused Crowley's gait to be quite a bit less slithery and more awkward than usual.)

"Yeah, I've got both of them with me today," Crowley said, as if this were quite a normal possibility. "Things are busy downstairs, you know. So I'm taking care of the kids while the other parents get important stuff sorted out."

One of the toddlers called out excitedly, "Ziph!" and stretched out her arms toward the angel.

By this point, Crowley had come within arm's reach of Aziraphale, and the angel took the baby demon who was reaching for him into his own arms. The other child remained firmly attached to Crowley.

"Why are you looking at me like that, Aziraphale?"

"There's two of them," Aziraphale said, still sounding just as dumbfounded as he had the first time he'd said it.

"Yeah?" Crowley said, still not seeing what the problem was. "What, did you think there was only one? But that would mean... did you think they were both the _same_ child?"

"Well, you only ever had one of them with you at a time. You call them both 'little monster' instead of using their names. I don't even know what this one's proper name is! It was reasonable to assume they were the same child."

"Reasonable? You mean to tell me you really can't tell them apart? It's not like they're identical twins! They may look somewhat alike, but they're a century* apart in age! They have different personalities. Victoria is the one who likes you. Viscera is still afraid you're going to smite her." The angel looked so offended at this that Crowley added, "Even though I keep telling her you would never do that."

Aziraphale didn't know how to handle this situation, so he suggested that they all go out for lunch. Unfortunately, he didn't think about how much more difficult it would be to wrangle two demon children in a restaurant than it was with just one...

~oOo~

*Children of infernal and/or celestial beings age at roughly 1% the rate humans do, so the kids are less than a year apart in physical appearance by human standards. (Their rate of psychological development is also roughly 1% that of humans.)


	4. Little Demon Daycare

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

"Unco Crow-ee!" a little demon yelled, throwing herself into Crowley's arms.

"Maggie!" Crowley replied, cuddling the child. "Still having trouble pronouncing your L's, I see."

"Uh-huh."

"Ok, well, your parent has to get to work, so wave bye-bye to them now."

The child dutifully waved to Beelzebub, who was standing at the doorway to Crowley's Little Demon Daycare Center.

"Bye Parent-2!"

Parent-1 was the designation given to the Archangel Gabriel, who insisted that Maggie was short for _Margaret_. (It was not actually short for Margaret.)

Crowley set Maggie down. The little demon girl ran over to play with Dagon's child, Fang. Fang had not yet chosen to express a gender, but damn sure liked to bite people (hence the name).

Crowley had no idea who Fang's other parent was, and didn't want to ask Dagon because he wasn't really _that_ curious... and also didn't want to risk being bitten by the Lord of the Files.

More parents dropped off their little demons, until the center was absolutely crawling with tiny fiends.

Crowley thought that everyone had arrived, and was about to start reading them a story, when Hastur slunk through the door, carrying a rusted metal bucket.

"Oh, hey, Hastur. What are you, uh... doing here?" Crowley asked, nonplussed.

Hastur just sneered at him and shoved the bucket into Crowley's hands, then left.

Crowley remained confused, until a splash drew his attention to the contents of the bucket, which were some brackish water and a dark green tadpole the size of a cantaloupe.

"He didn't even tell me what your name is," Crowley said to the tadpole. The tadpole continued to splash around in the bucket. "Guess we're calling you Tad, then."

~oOo~


	5. Demon Babies Are Stinky

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

Crowley thought that leaving _his_ baby with Aziraphale while he went to deliver the Antichrist was a practical solution. This proved to be the opposite of true, when not two minutes into the trip, he received a panicked phone call from the angel.

"Crowley!" Aziraphale wailed as soon as the demon answered the call. "Are demon babies supposed to smell horribly rotten?"

"What, like a hint of sulfur?" Crowley asked, nonplussed.

"No, like... like... something rotten, like something that's gone bad," Aziraphale answered, and continued to ramble while also still not providing an adequately _descriptive_ description of the smell.

As such, it took Crowley (whose mind was more on the task at hand than on the fact that Aziraphale thought his kid smelled weird) a long time to figure out what might actually be the problem.

"Angel," Crowley said, and Aziraphale immediately fell silent. "Sounds like the kid just needs to be changed."

There was a long silence from the other end of the phone, followed by a faint, confused inquiry: "...changed?"

"The diaper, angel. Babies shit their pants all the time."

~oOo~


	6. Puppy :)

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

"Hey! No!" Crowley yelled, sprinting toward his child in a panic.

The child ignored her father as she climbed onto the back of an enormous, snarling Hellhound.

"Pony~" the demon child cooed happily, hugging the giant dog's neck.

"No, it is not a pony! Get down from there!" Crowley said, reaching out to snatch his child from the creature's back.

She was still only a toddler. What if she got _hurt_?

But the Hellhound, which was looking distinctly more equine than it had a moment ago, growled at Crowley and sidled away from him.

"Oh, great. My daughter's bonded with a Hellhound now... and she's named it _Pony_."

~oOo~


	7. No Touch Froggy

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

"Will you stop playing with your kid and do some _work_," Hastur growled at Crowley.

"Oh, we were up to all kinds of shenanigans today," Crowley said. "Took Junior here to the mall, upset and inconvenienced a lot of humans, you know, caused general havoc and mayhem."

"Froggy!" the child exclaimed excitedly, reaching out toward Hastur.

"Stop that," Hastur snapped, taking a step back so that he was out of range of the sticky little hands.

"Froggy!" the child whined, leaning so far out of Crowley's arms that he had a hard time keeping a hold of the wiggly demon toddler.

"Crowley, make it stop trying to touch me!"

"FROGGY!" wailed the child, as Crowley walked away from the equally-upset Duke of Hell.

~oOo~


	8. Bedtime Story

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

Aziraphale put the little demon to 'bed' on the couch in the back room of the bookshop with a pillow, blanket, and stuffed toy snake.

"Go to sleep."

"I don't sleep," the tiny demon replied, scowling up at the angel.

"Crowley said that this is your bedtime, so go to sleep," Aziraphale argued. He'd babysat before, but this was his first time trying to get a small child to go to sleep, and he admittedly did not know what he was doing.

"Need a bedtime story," the child whined, and threw the toy snake on the floor.

Aziraphale frowned as he picked the snake up and tucked it back in beside the little demon.

He quickly miracled up a pile of children's storybooks and began to read.

However, he quickly discovered that Crowley's child was very picky about stories. The tiny demon did not want to hear _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_, or _Fox in Socks_, or _The Poky Little Puppy_, or any of the children's books that Aziraphale knew tiny human children enjoyed as bedtime stories.

Exasperated, he asked, "Well, what do you _want_ to hear?"

"Snake story!"

"...what snake story?"

At this point, the child was also rather exasperated, and apparently didn't know what to do with someone didn't know what 'the snake story' was, and started to cry.

Aziraphale attempted to comfort the child, but his efforts were met with a toy snake being flung into his face.

~oOo~


	9. Hiss

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

One of the little demons wandered over to Aziraphale and attached herself to the angel's leg.

She looked up at him and said, "I'm a hiss."

Aziraphale looked down at the toddler and chuckled.

"No, you're not, you silly goose," he said. It wasn't just an expression. While most birds were not the kind of creature which could be a demon's animal attribute, geese definitely were. "Geese honk, not hiss."

"Geese do hiss, angel," Crowley said, as the goose-demon-child began to cry.

"I no wanna be a honk," the child said, as tears rolled down her face. "_Clowns_ honk."

Aziraphale reached down to pat the child on the head.

"Of course not, dear," he said, not knowing what else to say. How did one comfort a demon who was afraid of clowns?

"Be a hiss, like Daddy," the child insisted.

"Of course you are, dear," Aziraphale said. "An evil, scary _hiss_, just like your father."

At that, the little demon cheered up immediately.

~oOo~


	10. You Can't Call Him That (Again)

**A/N:** This chapter is from Anathema's perspective, the night she gets a ride home in the Bentley... but this time she has to share the backseat with a little demon child. (Concepts for the child have been recycled from previous chapters.)

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

"Hi," Anathema squeaked out in surprise to the little girl sitting in the back of the two weird dudes' car. "What's your name?"

"Query," the child replied.

"Is that... short for something?" Anathema asked as she got into the car.

"No."

Having gone through life with a name like _Anathema_ herself, she didn't really feel like she could comment on the oddity of the child's name.

The child held up a plush flower... thing... and said, "And this is Stinky Bastard Plant."

Before Anathema could form a response to that, the chubby blond in the front passenger seat turned around to admonish the child.

"Don't _call_ it that. We decided that his name is Mr. Flower."

The child's face scrunched into a stubborn scowl.

"No. He's Stinky Bastard Plant. Ask Daddy."

The passenger turned to the driver and implored plaintively, "Crowley..."

"Give up, angel," the driver replied. "You're never going to get her to call it anything else."

~oOo~


	11. Janthony Junior

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

"I thought we were supposed to be delivering the Anti-Christ to Crowley. Why does he have a baby with him already?" Hastur grumbled to Ligur as Crowley approached them in the graveyard.

Once the formal greetings were dispensed with, Ligur inquired, "What's that baby you've got there, Crowely?"

"Oh, yeah, that... sorry, couldn't get a babysitter on such short notice. This is my son, Janthony Junior."

After a long awkward silence, Ligur said, "Shouldn't it be _Anthony_ Junior?"

"That's what I said," Crowley replied. "His full name is Anthony J. Crowley Junior. Anthony Junior for short."

As Crowley walked away with the Anti-Christ in his possession, Hastur said to Ligur, "He _did_ say 'Janthony' the first time. I know what I heard."

* * *

"Is that him?" Sister Mary Loquacious asked, reaching for the baby that was cradled in Crowley's arms.

"What? No, that's not the Anti-Christ! That's Janthony Junior. The Anti-Christ is in the basket."

~oOo~


	12. Errands with Azriaphale

~ You've Got Snabies (Snake Babies) ~

With a demon toddler around the shop part-time, Aziraphale was starting to notice that he ran out of snacks at an alarming pace.

The angel was starting to get grumbly in the tummy and Crowley wasn't due back for another few hours, so there was only thing to be done. He would just have to take the child with him to the grocery store to pick up a few things.

For being a demon, little Query was surprisingly well-behaved. She toddled along beside Aziraphale with one little hand fisted in the fabric of his pant leg, as the angel wandered the aisles gathering snacks.

She didn't so much as make a peep... until they passed by a display of stuffed toy unicorns, at which time she abruptly stopped walking and stared wide-eyed at the toys.

Aziraphale had only walked a few steps away before be he realized that the child was no longer hanging onto him, and turned around to see where she'd gone.

Once she noticed that Aziraphale was looking at her, Query pointed at the stack of plus unicorns and made vague desirous noises. While the child could actually speak in words (and sometimes did), she had learned her communication skills from Crowley... which often involved making awkward noises instead of enunciating things properly.

"Do you want a unicorn?" Aziraphale asked, reaching out to pluck one from the shelf as he said it.

Query nodded emphatically and Aziraphale handed her the toy.

"Cornycorn," the child cooed, hugging the toy and rubbing her face against its fluffy mane.

* * *

The next time they went shopping, a rubber snake came home with them. The time after that, it was a rabbit Beanie Baby.

And then, once Query had learned that Aziraphale would buy whatever she asked for, entire armloads of toy animals came home with them on every shopping trip.

Most of these toy remained at the bookshop, since Aziraphale wasn't sure Crowley would appreciate so many toys cluttering up his apartment. Little did the angel know, Query's bedroom at her father's apartment had so many toys in it that the piles of them Aziraphale had bought weren't likely to fit inside.

~oOo~


End file.
